Dear Eweedhome,
Thanks for the clarification about your amp -- you're correct, I didn't realize the ARC VT100 was tube. Always good to learn something new!
About the Manger speakers.... happy to describe them a bit. They're German-made (and thus rhyme with "longer" as opposed to "danger") and use a unique bending-wave, full-range (80-33,000Hz!) transducer. The plentiful technical details are available on the Manger web site (I tried copying the url into this message, but it's too long for the English-Language version, so I'd just Google "Manger speakers" and poke around what comes up. Manger UK is one of the first hits, and you can download pdfs with all the technical information).
If you want to audition them, the U.S. dealer will ship them to you for an in-home workout, along with a demo CD produced by Manger bearing an extraordinary range of sounds, from church bells pealing to Livingston Taylor whistling to orchestra, etc. I have never been so astonished as when I first hooked up these speakers (and many friends had the same reaction): I could have sworn there was someone right in the room whistling -- and it didn't matter if I was in the "sweet spot" or not. They sound just as realistic being overheard from the next room. They capture the woody, organic feel of live instruments (John Eliot Gardner's Bach cantatas never sounded so full and stirring); they are lush and smooth, crystal clear, there is no roll-off in the upper treble. And all this with the smallest speakers they make, the zerobox 109's!
I've compared the Manger zeroboxes side-by-side with a number of much more expensive speakers, including horn Trios, and to my ears they outshone every one of them except the $100+K horns for a fraction of the price (around $7K now, I think). Granted, they were also being driven by a variety of high-quality components, but still...
Speaking of other components, I've heard these speakers with a number of different amps, both solid state and tube. Despite the fact that the U.S. Manger dealer (and Daniela Manger herself) recommend solid state amps because the zerobox 109's are relatively low efficiency and sensitivity (4 ohms and 88 dB), and the reviewer at tnt-audio.com speculated that tube amps might, with their warmth, be too much of a good thing (though he didn't listen to that combo), my then-husband and I found that quality tube amps simply allowed the speakers (and the music) to sound the most real, immediate, moving, involving. (It was during these tests that I discovered the glories of the Wavac $20K tube amp.... sigh!)
Strangely, the company seems to suffer from bad marketing decisions, kind of like Apple before the iPod (superior product, small market). They've done little to promote their product, even hurting sales by weirdly recommending some rather low-end component accompaniments that don't do the speakers justice. (They started out, years ago, selling the driver by itself to DIY-ers who would make the speaker boxes, and this early history of frugality has persisted, to their detriment.) But the vast majority of people who have actually heard them, both professional reviewers and "laymen", are blown away by them. I think those of us who listen primarily to acoustic music are the most appreciative of their qualities.
Hope you get a chance to thoroughly test them out some day.
best,
limbic
